Does the Obama Administration Have a Middle East Policy? March 11th Panel Discussion

Recent statements by President Obama suggest that he has a coherent strategy for American policy in the Middle East. As he told the New Yorker, he wants to create “geopolitical equilibrium” in the region by balancing Washington’s longtime ally Saudi Arabia against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has had an adversarial relationship with the United States for 35 years. This balancing act, the president suggests, will bring some stability to an especially volatile part of the world, now engaged in what appears to be a sectarian civil war.

However, the fact that this Sunni-Shiite conflict is only getting more deadly, reaching now from the Iraqi desert to the shores of Lebanon, is evidence that the White House’s efforts at creating a regional stability are failing. Moreover, it suggests that maybe, in spite of the president’s compelling vision for the Middle East, there really is no coherent strategy. The question then is, does the Obama administration have a real Middle East policy, or is it just, as editor of The American Interest Adam Garfinkle recently put it, “distracted ad hocery”?

On March 11, Hudson Institute senior fellow Lee Smith will moderate a panel with Hillel Fradkin, Adam Garfinkle, Robert Satloff, and Tamara Cofman Wittes to discuss whether or not the Obama White House has a real strategy for the Middle East.

Panel

Hillel Fradkin, Panelist

Senior fellow with Hudson Institute, Director of Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, co-editor of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology

Adam Garfinkle, Panelist

Editor of The American Interest, speechwriter for both George W. Bush's secretaries of state

Robert Satloff, Panelist

Executive director of The Washington Institute, author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands

Tamara Cofman Wittes, Panelist

Senior fellow and the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from November of 2009 to January 2012